Confessor Read online

  All the men laughed—even the soldiers.

  Bruce, suddenly looking a little less sure of himself as his gaze darted around at his chuckling teammates, cleared his throat.

  “I guess, now that you put it that way, I can see some of what you mean. I guess I’d like to have some of your power drawings, too.” He thumped his chest with a fist. “I want the other teams to fear me.”

  Richard nodded. “They will, if you all do as I say. Keep in mind that before this first game the men on the other teams will probably see this red paint on all our faces and think it’s foolish. You have to be prepared for that. When you hear them laughing at you, let that laughter make you angry. Let it fill your hearts with the desire to jam that laughter right back down their throats.

  “In that very first moment when we step onto the field, the other team, as well as many of those watching, will probably not just laugh, but call us names. Let them. We want that. Let them underestimate us. When they do that, when they laugh at you or call you names, I want you to save up the anger you’re feeling. Fill your hearts with it.”

  Richard met the eyes of each man in turn. “Keep in mind that we are here to be victorious in the tournaments. We are here to win the chance to play the emperor’s team. We alone are worthy of that chance. Those men who are laughing at you are the worthless dregs of Ja’La players. We must sweep them aside so that we can get at the emperor’s team. The men in the first games are in our way. They are in our way and they are laughing at us.

  “When you step onto the field of play let their laughter ring in your ears. Soak it in, but keep silent. Let them see no emotion from you. Hold it inside until the right moment.

  “Let them think us fools. Let them be distracted by believing that we will be easy marks, rather than focusing on how to play us. Let them lower their guard.

  “Then, the instant the game begins, in a focused, coordinated manner unleash your rage against those who laughed at you. We have to hit them with our full force. We have to crush them. We have to make this game as important as if it were the emperor’s team we were playing.

  “We can’t simply win this first game by a point or two as is usually the way it goes. That’s not good enough. We can’t be satisfied with that kind of piddling victory. We must be unyielding. We must overwhelm them. We must hammer them into the ground.

  “We must beat them by at least ten points.”

  The men’s jaws dropped. Eyebrows went up. Such lopsided victories happened only in children’s mismatched games. A Ja’La team on this level winning by more than four or five points was virtually unheard of.

  “Every member of the losing team gets a lash of the whip for each point they lose by,” Richard said. “I want that bloody whipping to be on every tongue of every other team in this camp.

  “From that moment on, no one will laugh. Instead, each team who has to face us will worry. When men worry, they make mistakes. Every time they make one of those mistakes we will be ready to pounce. We will make their worry warranted. We will bring their worst fears to life. We will prove every sleepless moment of cold sweat to have been justified.

  “The second team we beat by twelve points.

  “And then, the next team will be even more fearful of us.”

  Richard waved his red finger in the direction of the soldiers on the team. “You know the effectiveness of such tactics. You crushed any city that stood against you so that those yet to be conquered trembled in fear as they waited for you to come. Those people knew your reputation and they greatly feared your arrival. Their fear allowed you to more easily conquer them.”

  The soldiers grinned. They could now put Richard’s plan in a frame of reference that they understood.

  “We want to make all the other teams afraid of the team with the red, painted faces.” Richard fisted his free hand. “Then, we will crush each of them in turn.”

  In the sudden silence, the men all made fists to match his and thumped them to their chests in oaths that they would make it so. These men all wanted to win, each for his own reason.

  None of those reasons was anything like Richard’s reason.

  He hoped not to ever have to play the emperor’s team—he hoped to get his chance long before then—but he had to be prepared to go that far, if necessary. He knew that a good chance might not come along before then. Should it not, he had to insure that they reached the final game of the tournament, when he was more confident of getting the chance he would need.

  Richard finally turned back to Johnrock and in short order completed the drawing with a few emblems that symbolized massive weight behind an attack, drawing them down each of Johnrock’s heavily muscled arms.

  “Do me next, will you, Ruben?” one of the men asked.

  “Then me,” another called out.

  “One at a time,” Richard said. “Now, as I’m working, we need to go over our strategy. I want each man to go into this game knowing exactly what to do. We all have to know the plan so that we can all follow it. We all have to know the signals. I want for us to be ready to rush the opponent from the first instant. I want to knock the wind out of them while they’re still laughing.”

  Each man in turn sat on the overturned bucket and let Richard paint his face. Richard approached each man as if the drawing was a matter of life and death. In a way it was.

  The men had all been pulled in by Richard’s sober lecture. A solemn mood settled over them as they sat silently watching their point man draw what only Richard knew were some of the most deadly concepts he knew how to create. Even if they didn’t understand the language behind those symbols, they understood the meaning behind what Richard was doing. They could see that each man looked fearsome.

  As each man was completed, Richard realized that it was like looking at a nearly complete collection of the designs that made up the dance with death, with elements of the boxes of Orden thrown in for good measure.

  The only symbols he’d left out were the ones he was saving for himself, the elements of the dance that invoked the most deadly of cuts—the ones that cut into the enemy’s very soul.

  One of the soldiers on his team offered Richard a polished piece of metal so that he could see himself as he began to apply the elements of the dance with death. He dunked his finger in the red paint, thinking of it as blood.

  The men all watched in rapt attention. This was their leader in battle, the one they followed in Ja’La dh Jin. This was his new face and they were all serious about learning it.

  As a final element, Richard added the lightning bolts of the Con Dar, the symbols representing a power Kahlan had invoked when the two of them had been trying to stop Darken Rahl from opening the boxes of Orden and she thought that Richard had been killed. It was a power meant for vengeance.

  Thinking about Kahlan, her memory lost, her identity taken from her, being at the mercy of Jagang and the evil beliefs of the Order, as well as picturing her in his mind with that lurid bruise on her face, made his blood boil with rage.

  Con Dar meant “Blood Rage.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Kahlan kept an arm protectively around Jillian as they followed closely behind Jagang. The emperor’s entourage made its way through the sprawling encampment to the silent awe of some, and the cheers of many. Some chanted Jagang’s name as he passed, shouting encouragement for his leadership in their fight to exterminate opposition to the Imperial Order, while many more lauded him as “Jagang the Just.” It never failed to dishearten her that so many could view him—or the Fellowship of Order itself—as custodians of justice.

  From time to time Jillian’s trusting, copper-colored eyes gazed up at Kahlan with gratitude for the shelter. Kahlan felt somewhat ashamed of her pretense of protection when she knew that in reality she could offer little safety to the girl. Worse, Kahlan might very well end up being the cause of any harm that came to Jillian.

  No. She reminded herself that she would not be the cause of such harm, should it come to pass. Jagang, as advocate fo
r the corrupt beliefs of the Fellowship of Order and the champion of unjust justice, would be the cause. The twisted beliefs of the Order justified, in their minds, any injustice in aid to their ends. Kahlan was not responsible—in part or in whole—for evil committed by others. They were answerable for their own actions.

  She told herself that she mustn’t allow herself to shift blame from the guilty to the victim. One of the hallmarks of the people plying evil beliefs was to always blame the victim. That was their game and she would not allow herself to play it.

  Still, it broke Kahlan’s heart that Jillian was once more a terrified captive of these brutes. These people from the Old World who would harm innocent people in the name of a greater good were traitors to the very concept of good. They were not capable of sincere feelings of heartache because they did not value good; they resented it. Rather than seeking values, it was a kind of corrosive envy that guided their actions.

  Kahlan’s only real satisfaction since being captured by Jagang had been that she had managed to engineer an escape for Jillian. Now even that was lost.

  As they marched through the camp, Jillian’s arm tightly circled Kahlan’s waist, her fingers clutched at Kahlan’s shirt. It was obvious that while the sinister nature of the soldiers all around them frightened her, she was more terrified of Jagang’s personal guards. It had been men like these who had hunted her down. She had managed to evade them for quite a while but, despite how well she knew the deserted ruins of the ancient city of Caska, she was still a child and no match for a search carried out by such determined and experienced men. Now that Jillian was a prisoner in the sprawling encampment, Kahlan knew that she had little chance of again helping the girl escape the clutches of the Order’s men.

  As they walked through the mud and refuse, weaving around the disorder of tents, wagons, and piles of gear and supplies, Kahlan turned Jillian’s face up and saw that at least the cut had stopped bleeding. One of the collection of plundered rings that Jagang wore had been responsible for the jagged gash over the bone of Jillian’s cheek. If only that were her biggest worry. Kahlan smoothed her hand over the girl’s head in response to a brave smile.

  Jagang had momentarily been quite pleased to have back a girl who had dared escape from him—and to have yet another means to torment and control Kahlan—but he had been more interested in learning all he could about the discovery down in the pit. It seemed to Kahlan that he knew something more about what ever it was that was buried than he was revealing. For one thing, he had not been as surprised by the find as she would have expected. He seemed to take the discovery in stride.

  Once he had seen to it that the area had been cordoned off and cleared of the regular soldiers, he gave strict instructions to the officers to seek him out immediately once they had breached the stone walls and gotten inside whatever it was that was planted so deep in the Azrith Plain. Once he was satisfied that everyone understood exactly how he wanted the discovery handled, and that everyone there was working diligently toward those ends, his attention had quickly turned to seeing a bit of the opening games of the tournaments. He was eager to appraise some of the eventual competition to his own team.

  Kahlan had been forced to go with him to Ja’La games before. She wasn’t looking forward to going again, primarily because the excitement and violence of the games put him in a stormy mood laced with savage carnal desires. Ordinarily the man was terrifying enough, capable of instantaneous and brutal violence, but when he was in an agitated, aroused mood after a day at Ja’La games he was altogether more intractable and willful.

  After the first time they’d gone to watch games the focus of his depraved lust had been Kahlan. She had fought her panic, finally coming to accept that he was going to do what he was going to do and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She had finally gone numb to the terror of being under him, resigning herself to the inevitable. She had turned her eyes away from his lecherous gaze and freed her mind to go to another place, telling herself that she would save her hot rage until the time was right, until a time when it would serve some purpose.

  But then he’d stopped short.

  “I want you to know who you are when I do this,” he had told her. “I want you to know what I mean to you when I do this. I want you to hate this more than you have ever hated anything in your entire life.

  “But you have to remember who you are, you have to know everything, if this is to truly be rape…and I intend it to be the worst rape you can suffer, a rape that will give you a child that he will see as a reminder, as a monster.”

  Kahlan didn’t know who the “he” was.

  “For it to be all of that,” Jagang had told her, “you have to be fully aware of who you are, and everything this will mean to you, everything it will touch, everything it will harm, everything it will taint for all time.”

  The idea of how much worse such a violation would be for her then was more important to him than sating his immediate urges. That alone spoke volumes about the man’s craving for revenge, and about how much she had engendered his lust for it.

  Patience was a quality that made Jagang all the more dangerous. He could easily be impulsive, but it was a mistake to think that he could be lured into becoming reckless.

  Feeling the need to make her understand his greater purpose, Jagang had explained that it was much the same as the way he punished people who angered him. If he killed such people, he’d pointed out, they would be dead and unable to suffer, but if he made them endure agonizing pain then they would wish for death and he could deny it. Witnessing their endless torment, he could be sure of their great regret for their crimes, of their insufferable grief for all that was lost to them.

  That, he’d told her, was what he had in store for her: the torture of regret and utter loss. Her lack of memory left her dead to those things, so he would wait until the proper time. Having reined in his immediate urges in favor of greater ambitions when she finally remembered everything, he had filled his bed with a variety of other women captives.

  Kahlan hoped that Jillian was too young for his tastes. She wouldn’t be, Kahlan knew, if she were to do anything to give him cause.

  As they moved through crowds of soldiers cheering for a game already under way, the royal guards forcefully shoved any men out of the way they judged to be too close to the emperor. Several men who didn’t move willingly enough, or quickly enough, got an elbow that nearly cracked their skulls. One burly drunk in a sour disposition, who didn’t intend on being shoved aside for anyone, even an emperor, turned on the advancing royal guards. As the soldier stood his ground, growling bold threats, he was eviscerated with one swift scything cut from a curved knife. The incident didn’t slow the royal party a single step. Kahlan shielded Jillian’s eyes from the sight of the man’s insides spilled in their path.

  Since it had stopped raining, Kahlan pushed the hood of her cloak back off her head. Dark clouds scudded low over the Azrith Plain, adding to the suffocating feeling of being closed in. The thick, murky overcast suggested that the first damp, cold day of winter would offer no chance of sunlight. It felt like the whole world was gradually descending into a cold, numb, everlasting gloom.

  When they reached the edge of the Ja’La field, Kahlan rose up on her toes, looking over or around the shoulders of the guards, trying to see the faces of the men already in the thick of play. When she realized that she was stretching in order to see the game, she immediately lowered herself back down. The last thing she wanted was for Jagang to ask her why she was suddenly so interested in Ja’La.

  She wasn’t really interested in the game, but she was interested in seeing if she could spot the man with the gray eyes, the man who had deliberately tripped and fallen in the mud so as to hide his face from Jagang—or maybe Sister Ulicia.

  If the rain didn’t return, it was soon going to be hard for the man to maintain a muddy face to hide his identity. Even with rain and mud Jagang would quickly become suspicious if the point man for Commander Karg’s team
walked around all the time with a muddy face. Then the man would find that the mud, rather than hiding him, only attracted Jagang’s suspicion. Kahlan fretted about what would happen then.

  Many of the men watching the game cheered and shouted encouragement when the point man for one of the teams made it into the opposing team’s territory. Blockers rushed in to prevent the man from gaining any more ground. The onlookers roared as the players toppled one another while other men scrambled to protect their territory.

  Ja’La was a game in which men ran, dodged, and darted past one another, or blocked, or chased the man with the broc—a heavy, leather-covered ball a little smaller than a man’s head—trying to capture it, or attack with it, or score with it. Men often fell or were knocked from their feet. Rolling across the ground without shirts, many were soon left slick not just with sweat, but with blood.

  The square Ja’La fields were marked out in a grid. In each corner was a goal, two for each team. The only man who could score, and only when it was his team’s timed turn, was the point man, and even then he had to do so from within a specific section of the grid on the opponents’ side of the field. From that scoring zone, an area running across the width of the field, he could throw the broc toward either of the rivals’ goal nets.

  It wasn’t easy to score. It was a throw of some distance and the goal nets weren’t large.

  To make it all the more difficult, the opposing players could block the throw of the heavy broc. They could also knock the point man back out of the shooting zone—or even tackle him—as he tried to score. The broc could also be used as a kind of weapon to knock interfering players out of the way. The point man’s team could try to clear the opposing players from in front of a goal net, or they could protect him from blockers so that he could try to find an opening in one net or the other so that he could make a shot, or they could split up and try to do both. Each strategy for each side had its advantages and disadvantages.